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Trainwreck Design

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Re: Trainwreck Design

#31

Post by aetherspawn »

bayindirh wrote: post #20
aetherspawn wrote: post #14

Haha, try and expand a partition on Linux using command line. It's nearly impossible if you're not a sysadmin [1]. You'll google it and find 10 different ways for 10 different distros, and most of them will require doing byte math (but you're not sure if KB is really kB and 1000 or 1024). If you get it wrong your computer blows up (probably). And if you think resizing was hard, try to defrag and shrink one! [1] For e…

...or you'll just install gparted and do it with a couple of clicks. It'll require root, yes. But in Windows you're already "root", so it doesn't count. No, "permission elevation prompts" doesn't count. You're still defacto Administrator on that system. BTW, none of the CLI tools allow you to overlap partitions or shrink below used percent. So you can't blow your data up unless you try really hard (like fdisk delete/…

I think command-line is the key word here. It is not so hard on Ubuntu in the GUI. But for example if you installed Red Hat CLI-only version, it's probably so hard you'll give up and just ask Red Hat support to look at your logs and send you the commands to run.

Re: Trainwreck Design

#33

Post by bayindirh »

aetherspawn wrote: post #31
bayindirh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or you'll just install gparted and do it with a couple of clicks. It'll require root, yes. But in Windows you're already "root", so it doesn't count. No, "permission elevation prompts" doesn't count. You're still defacto Administrator on that system. BTW, none of the CLI tools allow you to overlap partitions or shrink below used percent. So you can't blow your data up unless you try really hard (like fdisk delete/…

I think command-line is the key word here. It is not so hard on Ubuntu in the GUI. But for example if you installed Red Hat CLI-only version, it's probably so hard you'll give up and just ask Red Hat support to look at your logs and send you the commands to run.

The thing is, if you're a desktop user, you generally use gparted. If you're not using a GUI, you're already a sysadmin in most cases.

Systems like Raspberry Pi make these things easier, too. They both have docs, or you can do on your system with gparted already. Also, as I aforementioned, none of the CLI tools eat your data unless you force them to.

Lastly, all the tools accept KB, MB, etc. as prefixes/suffixes. So, I rarely make back of the napkin math for these things, if ever.

> But for example if you installed Red Hat CLI-only version, it's probably so hard you'll give up and just ask Red Hat support to look at your logs and send you the commands to run.

Actually it's not hard. You only need to know that you have your filesystems in a LVM (Logical Volume Manager) container. Unless you're not changing the size of the LVM volume, it's the same thing, only the device name changes.

If you're adding disks, you need to first increase the LVM size to span the other disk, and add or resize your partiton there.

It's not intentionally hard, you meet with a layer you generally don't see everyday. Even if you boot a LVM containing system from a live distro, say GRML, you only need to "activate" the LVM container with a single LVM command, and it's the same thing after that point.

It's a matter of thinking in layers.

Re: Trainwreck Design

#34

Post by atoav »

larodi wrote: post #22

(most) Kids will likely never learn these command and attributes and output like we passionately did in 1994. LLMs be spittin' them command lines quick and correct, transpiled/translated from English/French/...Macedonian if you like. they already do, and it already helps a lot. Perhaps one may learn to remember and , but will definitely not care to produce by heart oneliner bash abominations sprinkled with sygils and…

As a youngling I have to say, I always liked the idea of the shell as something where you can pipe stuff inbetween programs. It is a genius concept. The problem is that in the real world implementation of the idea you have something like bash, that sucks for text processing with all its footguns of unescaped strings, spaces, wildcard operators and such.

Maybe it has to do with strings not really having been a first class citizen in C? Processing strings in C is a (dangerous) pain even in the year 2024.

I often find myself just writing python scripts calling subprocesses (if needed, so much is already included), ideally with a --json option so I get proper machine-readable output. This has shown to be far more stable and reliable than bash.

Re: Trainwreck Design

#35

Post by Someone »

atoav wrote: post #28
notachatbot1234 wrote: post #10

A webpage that uses numeric identifiers for external references that are found only when scrolling to the very bottom of the page and show their URLs as plain text. Now that is a train wreck. Hyperlinks are the cornerstone of the web. Don't be afraid of using them!

You mean footnotes? As they have been used for centuries in print? The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, that is out of the scope of the original text. Ideally on a website meant for computer screens you wouldn't have them on the end, but in the margins, next to the information, but for short stuff it is okay to put them at the end of the c…

> The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context,
will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that)

Re: Trainwreck Design

#36

Post by topspin »

This complaint about df/mount/etc. recurs with noticeable frequency. Another ugly spot is iproute2's ip link/addr. Between containers and VMs and their virtual interfaces, link bonding, virtual bridges, macvlan/tap, etc., the list of "interfaces" proliferates. Trying to find an actual physical interface is difficult, and interpreting what is there is a challenge.

Improving this stuff isn't happening because no one is funding the work. A hobbyist or gainfully employed contributor stealing time from "real" work can't manage this anymore: complexity is too high now and the gatekeepers aren't -- for good reason -- going to tolerate naïve contributions.

There is very little money in the Linux world for anything a Linux distributor or hardware manufacturer doesn't care about. The former care only about the high value features people pay license/subscription/support fees for, and the latter just get drivers working, and maybe rework a kernel subsystem when absolutely necessary, and leave the rest.

The money exists. The Linux Foundation collects a quarter billion a year, for example. But they've found a long list of better priorities to spend it all on.

I don't know about the "trainwreck design" concept. There is nothing here that can't be solved given some hard headed refinement. It's just that no one is doing that.

Re: Trainwreck Design

#38

Post by teddyh »

anttihaapala wrote: post #27
teddyh wrote: post #21

From my .bashrc: alias dfx='df -x nfs -x none -x smbfs -x tmpfs -x cifs -x tmpfs -x fuse.sshfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs'

and it almost works, does not get rid of efivars... needed to add `-x efivarfs` for that .

I also see that ”nfs4” is missing. Update:

  alias dfx='df -x nfs -x none -x smbfs -x tmpfs -x cifs -x tmpfs -x fuse.sshfs -x devtmpfs -x squashfs -x overlay -x efivars -x nfs4'

Re: Trainwreck Design

#39

Post by benrutter »

notachatbot1234 wrote: post #10

A webpage that uses numeric identifiers for external references that are found only when scrolling to the very bottom of the page and show their URLs as plain text. Now that is a train wreck. Hyperlinks are the cornerstone of the web. Don't be afraid of using them!

I think it's an intentional aesthetic choice[0].

Hyperlinks would be convenient, but something about the raw text / ascii art vibe makes me happy everytime I read a blog post from j3s even if it doesn't have the conveniences of the modern web.

[0] https://j3s.sh/about.html

Re: Trainwreck Design

#40

Post by hk__2 »

Someone wrote: post #35
atoav wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean footnotes? As they have been used for centuries in print? The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, that is out of the scope of the original text. Ideally on a website meant for computer screens you wouldn't have them on the end, but in the margins, next to the information, but for short stuff it is okay to put them at the end of the c…

> The difference between them and a simple hyperlink is that they can and often will provide some additional context, will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that)

> will give you additional context on hover (on systems that support that)

"hover" has no meaning on touch-based interfaces.

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